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Sunday, March 6, 2016

The Curse of Memory: how the first Christian emperor erased his family from history

The greatest punishment in Roman
law was not the death penalty, but the damnatio
memoriae: a mix of a death execution, the seizure of the person’s property,
and the removal of all traces and memory of his life. Such a sentence implied
that statues of the condemned person could be destroyed, his face would be
erased from paintings and his name could be erased or blotted out from written
documents, coins and even from the stone inscriptions in monuments.

Many of the “evil” emperors such
as Caligula, Domitian or their relatives (such as Livilla, the daughter-in-law
of Emperor Tiberius, and Geta, the brother of Emperor Caracalla) suffered damnatio memoriae sentences. Above and below I
show pictures of a stone pillar in Spain where the name of Emperor Domitian was
erased after his death and a portrait of the Severus imperial family where
Caracalla’s brother Geta was erased from the painting. I also show a cameo portrait of Livilla, daughter-in-law of Emperor Tiberius, who was executed in 31 AD because of accusations that she had conspired with her lover Sejanus to kill Emperor Tiberius and take over the imperial throne. Also, Livilla’s own mother accused her of having poisoned her husband (Emperor Tiberius’ son) and that perhaps her children were the result of adulterous liaisons. The Senate removed all mentions of Livilla after her death, so there are no absolutely certain portraits of her, but some scholars think that this cameo fits her description and could be a rare portrait that survived the harsh legal sentence.

The term damnatio memoriae was actually created in the 16th century by the German legal scholar Christoph Schreiter in a thesis of 1689. In practice the Romans applied several different measures to reach the joint effect that the condemned individual would lose all the honors of being a Roman citizen and its memory. For example, the removal of all the written inscriptions of the name of the condemned was a sentence called the abolitio nominis. For the Romans the removal of memory was the opposite of the Apotheosis, which represented the glorification of a deceased person (such as an emperor or empress) to divine honors. Since Roman society stressed the importance of honor, respectability and fame, then erasing one's memory was the most severe punishment of all.

The Roman emperor who
became perhaps the biggest user of the “curse of memory” sentence was Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor. In particular Constantine I
applied the damnatio memoriae to
several of his family members who at certain point aroused his anger or stood
in his path to power. While Christianity is a religion that values
forgiveness, apparently such teachings do not preclude erasing the memory of
your enemies and relatives. Perhaps if one simply forgets their hated memory,
then it is not really necessary to forgive them at all.

Constantine lived one of the most
turbulent periods in history, since those were the decades in which Christianity
was on the point of being either the largest minority religion of the Empire or
its major religion. This was a breaking point at both the political and social
levels. At the political level the Empire was divided among four co-emperors
and each one resented the power of its colleagues. Each single emperor was
waiting for a moment of weakness from its rivals in order to invade its
territory and stripe away his powers. Constantine started as the weakest of the
co-emperors, being in charge only of Britain and Gaul. These territories were
weak in terms of economic resources and armies, and were also continuously
threatened by invasions of Scottish and Germanic tribes. Therefore Constantine
was the weakest of the four co-emperors and the most likely candidate to be humiliated
and eliminated from the political scheme. However, Constantine and also his
eldest son Crispus were extraordinarily good generals. Constantine won wars
against each of his co-emperors which had much larger armies and stronger
navies. Even if Constantine was not known today as the first Christian emperor,
he would certainly be remembered as a general of the same importance as Caesar
or Alexander the Great. Below I show a picture of myself and my twin brother in
front of Constantine’s bronze statue in York, England, where he was first
acclaimed as Emperor in 306 AD. In the next few years Constantine would often
receive messages and ultimatums from his co-emperors asking him to resign himself to a lower imperial role. However, in less than twenty
years Constantine would have taken over all the territories of his rival
co-emperors and by 324 AD he was the complete master of the Roman
Empire. In 337 AD Constantine was planning a big war against the powerful
Persian emperor Shapur II, justified as a crusade to protect the
Christian followers in the Persian Empire.

At the social level the Roman
Senate and its old aristocratic families now realized the traditional pagan
cults were irrelevant to most of the population and were only practiced at
official ceremonies which no one cared about. Think of those boring speeches
that politicians give nowadays on TV and then no one remembers a single sentence in the next day? Well, that was how the top pagan priests felt like around
300 AD. Besides Christianity other sun religions such as Mithraism were now
popular all over the Empire and clearly the traditional Roman paganism was
withering away rapidly.
Traditionally, Rome was a state with complete religious liberty (as long as its
religious supporters did not defy the imperial laws and paid their taxes). One
could even think of Ancient Rome as a “market of religions”. There were temples
of all sorts of deities standing side by side. One could go worship a snake
fertility god or go listen to an Egyptian cat-goddess speak through a statue
(with a hollow space inside where a priest or priestess could hide and speak).
Others would participate in the mysteries of obscure eastern religions with
different grades of tests designed to evaluate their worshippers’ worth as they
climbed the orders of their religion. It was during Constantine’s adolescence
that the main Roman Emperor Diocletian launched the greatest persecution of
Christians during Roman history. Most of the stories of Christian martyrdom
come from this time period. Some estimate that the Diocletian’s persecution
could have made around 3,000 victims, which was a significant number by Roman
standards (although much less than the 20th century religious and
political conflicts).

Constantine lived
through turbulent times, therefore he hit his adversaries
as hard as he could even if these were close family members.
Constantine first applied a damnatio memoriae to his father-in-law (and also
his step-grandfather), the old co-emperor Maximian. Actually, Constantine had
good reasons for such a measure. Constantine had treated well his father-in-law
and given him some powers with his army, but a few months later Maximian
decided to rebel and support his own son against Constantine. After this
Constantine quickly won against Maximian and forced him to commit suicide.
However, some years later, after Constantine had won the war against Maximian’s
son, the co-emperor Maxentius, he re-habilitated Maximian’s memory and gave
great honors to his deceased father-in-law. Later Constantine started a war
against his powerful co-emperor in the East, Licinius, who was also his
brother-in-law. After Constantine and his eldest son Crispus won several large
scale battles, he became the undisputed master of the Roman world and issued a damnatio memoriae against Licinius, accusing
him of killing the families of other co-emperors and of the persecution of
Christians. Modern evidence shows that Licinius in fact supported Christian
rights, had a Christian wife and may even have been a Christian himself,
therefore Licinius was a victim of Constantinian propaganda.

Just two years after Constantine
became master of the world, he ordered the execution of his eldest son Crispus
by “cold poison” and a damnatio memoriae
against Crispus, his wife and his only grandson. This must have been a big
surprise to all of the world, since Crispus had been a good and reliable
general of Constantine and was his only adult son, therefore his most plausible
future heir. One month later Constantine also ordered the execution of his own
wife, Fausta, by an “overheated bath” and her damnatio memoriae. Fausta was the mother of three male children and
one daughter of Constantine, therefore again this must have been a hard
decision. Also, Constantine had Fausta in high esteem and had given her the
divine honors of Augusta just three years before. Below I show a coin with
Crispus image and a bust of Fausta.

Historians speculate that the
death of Crispus and Fausta are related, but no one knows exactly how since the
“curse of memory” erased historical records that would have been essential for
our understanding. Crispus was Constantine’s son from a previous marriage,
therefore Fausta was only his step-mother. Ancient historians Zosimus, the
anonymous work Epitome de Caesaribus,
the 8th century fiction Passion of Artemius, and the 12th
century scholar Joannes Zonaras, say that Fausta wanted her own children to
become the future emperors and told Constantine that Crispus wanted to rape her
or begin an adulterous affair. In this possible version of the story
Constantine orders in rage the execution of his eldest son and after one month
realizes that Fausta lied and kills her too. However, other historians point
out that an “overheated bath” could indicate an attempted abortion and
therefore a possible adulterous affair between Fausta and Crispus which resulted
in an unwanted pregnancy. Significantly, Fausta’s sons later became Roman
Emperors after Constantine’s death and none of them tried to rehabilitate their
mother’s reputation, therefore this points out that they believed her to be
guilty of something.

There is, however, a third
possible explanation of this story. An article by historian Patrick Guthrie in
1966 suggests that Constantine ordered both deaths on political reasons. Constantine
wanted to build a dynasty for his children, but that created difficulties in
managing their ambitions. Therefore he orders the death of Crispus to prevent
his ambition and remove a threat against the three sons of Fausta. Then he
orders the death of Fausta as a signal to his other children and relatives that
Constantine is firmly in the grasp of absolute power and that he would not
hesitate to kill anyone if he deems it necessary. While this explanation may
sound a bit off, we must remember the ancient world often had harsh struggles
for power. The previous rulers of the Seleucid or Ptolemaic empires often had
to order the deaths of their siblings to keep power. Also, many Roman emperors
before Constantine and also his Byzantine successors often ordered the
imprisonment and death of husbands, wives and sons, in order to keep their
power. Therefore it is not impossible that Constantine himself feared treason
from inside his own family. Whatever happened the erasing of memory leaves a
lot to our imagination for solving this mystery novel.

Hi Carlos. I really enjoyed this discussion. It relates to a coin I picked up a few years ago. It is a coin of Licinius, but you can't tell it because the coin has been so badly defaced by scratches. At the end of this comment I’ve attached a link to look at the coin. The central question for the numismatist is whether or not these scratches occurred in antiquity or in the present day. The scratches on Licinius’s face are made in a back-and-forth manner. It's not the result of a single random shovel strike; the scratches are localized and intentional. The scratches also show the same green patina that affects the entire coin. In other words, the scratches were made in antiquity. The reverse of this coin is untouched, suggesting that whoever scratched this emperor’s face had an animus against the emperor; the rest of the coin is untraumatized. While it is impossible to know for sure, I believe that this defaced coin reflects the damnatio memoriae issued by Constantine against Licinius. That may be a romantic reading of a beat-up old coin, but we do know that coins of Caligula, Domitian, and Geta were all defaced following their damnationes; thus, it may not be surprising to find a coin similarly defaced for Licinius. Here’s a link to the coin: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/23980399/Licinius.jpg